OurPrayerCenter articles about how to build a free online community for Christian churches

The dirty little secret of DIY church website builders.

There are many site builders out there to let you easily create a beautiful looking church website from a design template and update it from time to time. Wordpress or SquareSpace are both great examples. But just getting started is the easy part.

Do ‘you’ want to update it tomorrow and next week and the week after and post all the church ministry events and calendar items and the blog posts or announcements for all the parish organizations?

That’s the dirty secret of the DIY site builders. It’s the “Y”. Everything is the “Yourself”. Every post, every page update, every event and pretty soon you fall behind and the site is outdated and stale.

You just can’t keep up with all the “It” that “You” have to “Do” for the site. And what about all the other channels of communication your parishioners use like Facebook or Twitter or eMail. When was the last time that you did an update there or sent an email message?

Sure DIY sounds great at first, but if you’ve tried and failed with a template site builder now you’ve realized that DIY is a lot of work. Especially if you have a dynamic church with active ministries. There’s a lot going on and pretty soon the ministries realize that the parish office is an overloaded bottleneck to communication.

Then your group leaders go off and start their own Facebook page or Google site because they really want to do better, to grow their ministry and make an impact in the world.

They bypass the office or webmaster and become a technology island, not really engaging everyone at the parish, just their group.

That’s why OurPrayerCenter was built from the ground up on church community collaboration. We’ve changed the way church uses tech for faith and fellowship.

We approach church tech not as a DIY project for you to build, but as a solution for every Ministry and Group Leader to use for creating a sense of connection and relevance. And for every parish member to participate in the discussion.

We provide a platform to engage the entire parish, remove barriers of communication, bottlenecks and friction and engage many hands in building real-life community centered on prayer.

You can discover more of our collaborative community building features here. We hope you’ll join us.